Country of tradition – story of Jin Yang (JY)

5.5.1. Paradigmatic analysis of Jin Yang’s story

One of the two prioritized main characters, Jin Yang is a child gymnast fighting for a place in the 2008 Olympic Games. China Revealed was filmed in 2005, when China was preparing for the Olympic Games, and this timing would doubtless increase Western interest in the topic. Jin Yang is an only child, but in the documentary we learn that she has had to endure incredible physical pain and sacrifice her childhood to gymnastics practice in an academy in Beijing. Although only twelve years old, she already places great store on national pride and glory. Her mind is filled with what her father and coach have told her to do - to practice hard and hope to be selected to the national gymnastics team so that she can compete in the Games on behalf of China. Jin Yang was chosen to be filmed in this documentary, as her story is used to represent the life of China’s younger generation, only children under great pressure from their family.

Firstly, the one child policy is considered in the American ideological framework to be

an “extreme population control method”²⁴⁵. It has always been considered as a controversial measure, as it is a violation of human rights according to American values. As I argued in the previous chapter in relation to the topic of American ideologies and perceptions, respect for human rights is one of most significant conventions accepted by the American people. We could thus share in the conclusion drawn by Harding, that “Americans now seem more willing to apply their own values and principles to an assessment of China. In particular, Americans feel justified in asking hard questions about the state of individual liberty and human rights in China, even though the Chinese leadership itself continues to deny the applicability of such ‘bourgeois’ concepts to their own country.”²⁴⁶ From the perspective of the American value system, such hard training forced upon little children is absolutely inhumane, and could trigger a Western memory of Chinese women’s “deformed feet”.

JY bears the physical and psychological demands of her gymnastic training because it is her father’s wish instead of her own will - or to put it another way, her father’s will has become her own. In JY’s life, her father’s intentions and national pride are her first priority. As we saw earlier, one major element of Chinese tradition is the collective social culture rooted in Confucian philosophy, which has deeply influenced Chinese society for about two thousand years and has harmony and obedience as its philosophical essence. Traditionally speaking, inside a family, children must do what their parents require, and this social order still plays a significant role in the lives of the younger generations.

5.5.2 JY’s first sequence

Sequences involving JY appear three times in the documentary. The first one comes directly after Xiao Cui’s Buddhist martial art sequence, and focuses on her training regime and her dormitory at the gymnastic school. JY’s father is introduced in this

245 McElroy,Damien China is furious as Bush halts UN 'abortion' funds published on 03 Feb 2002

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/1383627/China-is-furious-as-Bush-halts-UN-abortion-funds.html 246 Harding,Harry 1991: 255

sequence and interviewed at their family home. In this first sequence, we get a general idea that JY and her companions are required to train hard every day at the boarding school. Through these camera images, we are in a position to see many little children, about four or five years old, practicing gymnastic movements. A couple of close up shots make it pretty clear that these children are both young and confused. It seems that they do not quite understand why they are being trained or what they are supposed to be learning, but simply repeating movements. The narrator explains, “Children at the age of four are in training six days a week, six hours a day.” The images and narration combine to show spectators these children’s arduous efforts to realize their dreams. However, this hard training scene also strongly conveys the message that this training is inhumane and that it divests the children of their right to enjoy their childhood.

When the sequence moves on to JY’s interview in her dorm room, we learn that the girl’s home is in Beijing like her school. Even so, due to the intensive training, she is not allowed to stay at home but must sleep at the school. She has to stay in her dorm even though she very much dislikes two of her roommates. The worst is that if she misses her family, she can only cuddle the teddy bear from her parents and think of them. All these images demonstrate that there is not only physical pain for child athletes to bear, but also psychological suffering.

As for JY’s father, he cannot visit his daughter frequently either; therefore, he has built a shrine for her at home. This shrine is positioned on the left-hand side in the background of the frame, whilst JY’s father stands in the foreground on the right side.

In cinematography, objects on the left have more significance. Hence, in this composition, the eye-catching object is the shrine built by JY’s father. We see JY’s picture in the middle; to the right of her picture are her medals and certificates. Under her picture is a calligraphy banner, which reads “healthy, safe and happy” (Pingan Kuaile) in Chinese. The shrine looks as if it has been set up for somebody who has passed away. Thus, we can see how much JY’s parents miss her, but she cannot live with her family because of her gymnastic training.

After watching JY’s first sequence, the audience has been invited to feel sympathy for the family, or even mystification, as, for Americans, individualism and free will should be given the first priority. Instead of acting on her wishes to stay with her parents and enjoy a happy childhood, JY has to make sacrifices to achieve her dream, or, more precisely, her father’s ambition – to be selected to the national team and win a medal for China in the 2008 Olympics. The children have to put up with the distance from their families and the hard training program, indicating that they have no freedom to follow their own wishes or enjoy their own individual rights. In accordance with the collectivist principle, JY’s personal interest is subsumed into the collective interest, in keeping with typical Chinese moral standards.

5.5.3 JY’s second sequence

Sequence protocol

In this sequence, JY’s father comes to pick her up from boarding school on Saturday afternoon, her only free time during a hard week of training. He takes his daughter to a theme park in Beijing to have a couple of hour’s fun. The sequence shots are as follows:

1) A medium shot of JY running to her father

2) Two medium shots of JY’s father and JY walking together, with big, happy smiles on their faces

3) CU of JY’s face

4) Full shot of them leaving the gymnastics school, on the left side of a national flag billboard. JY’s father is on a bicycle, JY is sitting on the bicycle’s back seat.

5) A full shot of JY’s father and JY walking side by side.

6) Tilt shot from circling horse to JY and her father.

7) Full shot of a roller coaster in Beijing’s theme park 8) Close shot of JY and her father in an interview

9) Medium shot of JY and her friend sitting in the first row of the roller coaster 10) Close shot of JY pulling down the safety protection and then cast to her face 11) Full shot of the whole roller coaster on track

12) Track shot of JY’s nervous face

13) Medium shot of JY and her friend, JY closing her eyes tightly and her friend lowering her head to her arm

14) Backlit full shot of the roller coaster moving fast on its track

15) Track shot of JY waving her right hand when the roller coaster returns to the starting point

Sequence interpretation – “To be somebody”

In the first part of this sequence, we can see that JY is truly happy to meet her father, even if they can only see each other once a week. From shot 1 to shot 7, we are drawn into a pleasant atmosphere and feel how much they enjoy their time together.

Then follows shot 8. In this interview, her father mentions that the reason JY loves going on the roller coaster is because this experience gives her more courage in her gymnastic practice. The impression is given to the audience that the poor girl cannot forget about improving her gymnastics performance even when she is trying to have some fun.

The sense of the pressure on JY is increased by the montage, which might arouse sympathy among spectators. The second montage begins with a full shot of JY jogging beside a lake in a park, while her father rides a bicycle behind her. During this short time with her father, she is still pushed to engage in skipping and jogging.

This footage is filmed in a Chinese park (Appendix 17), decorated with willows and pavilions, which are, as we have seen, two major signifiers of the romantic vision of China in the West. In a relaxing environment, there are couples rowing a boat on the lake, and some people doing Tai Chi in the background – which connects with our analysis of the previous story of Xiao Cui, in which Tai Chi emerges as a traditional exercise technique for physical fitness). In contrast with the fun Tai Chi in the park, the father and child continue their own training routine. The sharp contrast between the casual surroundings and the tense training is emphasized further by a pan shot from JY’s father sitting on the bicycle (sharp focus) and people doing Tai Chi or dancing (soft focus) to JY skipping rope. JY is shown skipping among a group of

elderly people who are doing exercises for their health, emphasizing her incongruity with them. Later on, the camera shows us JY jogging through dancing people in front of her father’s bicycle. The adults are enjoying their gentle exercise, whereas this little girl has to keep jogging on her only free day to improve her physical competence for the competition. They are all practicing sport, but this girl is undergoing harsh training, unlike the adults who can enjoy the pleasure of a leisure sport.

JY is an only child; hence she carries the burden of huge psychological pressure to satisfy her parents’ expectations, like any other only child in contemporary China.

The One-child policy restricts each family to a single child, at least in urban areas.

This policy means that, on the one hand, the child may be spoiled by the whole family; but on the other hand, he or she is also the only hope for the family and has to assume a lot of responsibilities. In JY’s case, she has had to sacrifice her family reunion for training, for she cannot afford to disappoint her father. Her father hopes that JY will be selected to the national team and finally win a gold medal in the Olympic Games. In her interview in the second montage, she says, “When I started training, nobody wanted me to continue, because it is too harsh for me, except my dad.” She emphasizes her father’s ambition and anticipation for her at the end of the whole sequence. She expresses her own wish to succeed in the light of her father's aspirations: “I would be happy to be selected to the national team, but I think my dad would be happier.” It seems that winning a gold medal is her father’s wish rather than her own. The high expectations of parents drive their children to make huge efforts to pursue future success.

Thus, the audience is led to see that at least one core value of the American dream, to be “somebody” and to achieve success, is shared by Chinese society. This value was reinforced by the One-child policy in contemporary Chinese society, for the only child has to take on all the hope and pressure from their parents, to be competitive, to study much harder than his or her parents’ generation. This is encapsulated by the Chinese idiom “to wish children to become dragons (Wang zi cheng long)’” - meaning to become successful, because the dragon symbolizes wealth and

achievement in Chinese culture. Speaking of the pressure imposed by Chinese parents on their children, Michael Bristow writes in his report for the BBC on the Asia-Pacific region, “China's family planning policy may have successfully limited most homes to just one child, but it has also increased the pressure on the child each family has. Parents are now keener than ever to make sure their offspring grow up to be educated, successful and wealthy. Inevitably, these high expectations often lead to conflict between parents and their children, who sometimes fail to fulfil these hopes.”²⁴⁷

As a child, JY has been put through a very tough and physically torturous training programme. Thanks to this brutal training regime, JY and the other child athletes in the gymnastic school have never eaten candy or been spoiled like other children their age. Through footage of a training scene in the school, the audience is provided with an insight into the training life of these child athletes, starting with the low-angle shot of JY’s jump from one side of a bar to the other. This is followed by a medium shot of a girl building her back muscles by carrying a heavy metal weight on her back.

Then we are presented with more shocking images: in a tilt shot we see a girl with her leg and ankle heavily bandaged (Appendix 18), who is nonetheless continuing her training. Next, we see a man pricking the blister on a girl’s palm with a nail-clipper (Appendix 19). After this CU shot is an ECS shot of the girl’s bleeding hand.

Finally, we watch JY grabbing a steel shelf and putting her whole body weight on her arms, while simultaneously lifting her legs to her chest over and over again. She says in her interview, “Most of all, I was so scared of being forced to stretch my legs over and over again. Sometimes I thought I was doing the same thing all afternoon.”

From this little girl’s words, we can tell that the training which she has to constantly repeat is very boring and tough for a child her age.

The training regimes of the kind experienced by JY here were labeled “inhumane”²⁴⁸ by David Shambaugh, a specialist on China at George Washington University and the Brookings Institution. JY’s story in the documentary could cause audiences to

247 http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7001561.stm

248 Shambaugh,David “Yes, Award Olympic Games to a Changing China“, from the Opinion Column of the New York Times, July 13th, 2001

think of media coverage of China’s athletics training, which had been condemned as inhumane for a long time, an impression which was also deeply strengthened by media representations. As Barry Gewen wrote in the Time’s report on “Olympian Questions”, “China’s Olympics program has resulted in the forcible separation of talented children from their families; the budding athletes are then sent to government camps where they are subjected to apparently cruel and inhuman training schedules.”²⁴⁹ In another Times report, the author interviewed the father of an Olympic Gold Medal winner, who commented on his son’s training conditions,

“Every time I think about him training, I feel so sad that my heart hurts. For him, and for me, there is so much pain.”²⁵⁰

Generally speaking, it can be convincingly claimed that the Chinese care about very different things than Westerners do. They have no tradition of individual democracy or privacy or liberty and therefore the violations of such values in China are seen as of little consequence.²⁵¹ By contrast with Western individualist principles, Chinese society is organized under the guidance of collective principles, which makes it short on individual liberty or justice. Thus, the reputation of the whole country is more valued than a personal reputation; the national interest is far more important than an individual interest. This view is also upheld in The Great Wall in Ruins, “For centuries the Chinese were taught from childhood that public interest should be placed above individual interest.”²⁵² In such a collective cultural context, JY and her team mates have been motivated to win gold medals for their country at the Olympic Games, by withstanding hardship on the journey to success. Their personal interests are supposed to be cast aside.

China is a society structured by a collective culture and family hierarchy. Having been affected by Confucian philosophy for such a long time, children’s own desires might not be taken into very serious consideration. Rather they are expected to obey

249 This report was published online on July 30, 2008.

http://papercuts.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/07/30/olympianquestions/?scp=3&sq=China's%20athlete%20training,%20inhumane&st=cse 250 Macur,Juliet “In China’s Medal Factory, Winners Cannot Quit“ published on June 21, 2008

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/21/sports/olympics/21athlete.html 251 Conroy, Hilary 1991: 310

252 Chu,Godwin C. & Ju, Yan'an 1993: 156

their parents’ wishes in most cases. Chinese parents love their children so much that they believe only they can make sufficiently wise decisions to ensure their children a brilliant future. Children are assumed to be too young to be decision-makers. In JY’s case, she wanted to quit once after the Chinese New Year break, but her father did not approve and persuaded her to go back to the gymnastic school. JY did what her father asked her to do and devoted herself again to training.

5.6 Country of antiquity and totalitarianism – story of Yang Fuxi (YF)